A Look at 2025: Is Teleporting Really This Close?

By Kimberly Weisul | Yahoo Small Business

A new report looks at the path of scientific research and offers some surprising conclusions.

What's life going to look like in 2025?

Well, the folks in Thomson Reuters' IP and science group have come up with an ingenious method of building a crystal ball. To divine which emerging technologies could gain widespread traction by 2025, they looked at recently published patents and scientific papers. The papers that had been cited a large number of times were deemed more influential; patent classifications were ranked by the number of recent patents in that particular category.

The core assumption seems to be that if the scientific and entrepreneurial communities are putting particular effort into something today, they'll make some good progress within the 10 years. If that's true, these are the top 10 innovations that will alter our world between now and 2025: